This second post will focus on Ravitch’s analysis of the research which predicted the defeat of accountability-driven, charter-driven policies. Perhaps the most striking pattern documented in Slaying Goliath is how they failed in the way that scholars and practitioners anticipated.

Decades of Disruption-driven reform began with the false claim “that American education was failing and the only way to fix it was with standards, tests, competition, and accountability.” As Arne Duncan’s public relations officer and Walton-funded reformer Peter Cunningham said, “We measure what we treasure.”

Ravitch’s response was, “I was taken aback because I could not imagine how to measure what I treasure: my family, my friends, my pets, my colleagues, my work, the art and books I have collected.” And that foreshadows the victory of the Resistance over Goliath. Most educators, patrons, and students agree that children are more than a test score.

No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top set impossible test score targets. They were based in large part on the weird idea that “no-excuses” behaviorist pedagogies could be quickly “scaled up,” providing poor children of color a ladder to economic equality. Drawing on the tradition of Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner, reformers “rigidly prescribed conditioning via punishments and rewards.” Previewing their fatal flaw, Ravitch observes, “Behaviorists, and the Disrupters who mimic them today, lack appreciation for the value of divergent thinking, and the creative potential of variety. And they emphatically discount mere ‘feelings.’”

When educators resisted, corporate reformers became livid and doubled down on the punitive. Perhaps their worst debacle was using value-added teacher evaluations to hold each individual educator accountable for test score growth. It combined inappropriate test outputs with an unreliable and invalid algorithm, the VAM, as a club to enforce compliance. In the short run, it forced educators, who had previously tried to keep their heads down and “monkey wrench” testing mandates to join patrons and students in the Resistance. By 2018, however, pent up anger exploded as teacher strikes spread across the nation.

Today, many or most of Goliath’s coalition have become disenchanted with standardized testing, but their Disruption model can’t function without it. Few have gone as far as Paymon Rouhanifard, the former Camden superintendent who abolished report cards after listening to complaints, and denounced standardized testing as he left the job.

The more common path is to spin their punitive tests as “personalized” learning, and their incentives and disincentives as the “portfolio model.” As Ravitch explains, “A portfolio district is one where the local board (or some entity operating in its stead) acts like a stockbrokerage, holding onto winners (schools with high test scores) and getting rid of losers (schools with low test scores).”

As was also predicted by Campbell’s Law, test-driven accountability (made more intimidating by the dual threat of test-driven competition with charters) led to corruption. The cheating was far greater than just the scandals where adults erased and changed bubble-in answers. Graduation rates were easy to manipulate. For instance, NPR reported a “heartwarming story” in 2017 about a school with 100% graduation rate. A subsequent FBI investigation and a district audit found 1/3rd of the school’s graduates lacked credits and only 42% were on track to graduation.

And that leads to the corruption associated with school choice. Today’s Disrupters seem to be doubling down on charters to drive transformative change. As explained in a previous post, in 1988 Al Shanker saw charters as a path towards innovation. Within two years, however, the promise of win-win experimentation started to be undermined when conservative reformers Terry Moe and John Chubb claimed “choice is a panacea.”

In this case, it was choice-advocate Paul Peterson who predicted the political future. Charters didn’t take off because of the balanced approach of Shanker, but because reformers “radicalized” the concept. And, of course, there was plenty of big bucks available for pushing their radical but false narrative.

Within a decade, a shocking number of non-educators had been convinced by Goliath’s spinsters that the KIPP’s behaviorist model could be scaled up. As Slaying Goliath explains, “The biggest innovation in the charter sector was the invention of ‘no-excuses’ schools.” It took nearly another decade for policy makers to accept the fact that charters get average results except for those with high attrition.” And it took nearly as long to reveal the much greater down sides of charters…

Regardless of whether we’re discussing high-stakes testing, charter expansion, or the other pet theories, we should all heed Ravitch’s most important lesson of the past few decades is that “Reform doesn’t mean reform. It means mass demoralization, chaos, and turmoil. Disruption does not produce better education.”

Slaying Goliath celebrates a great victory for public education and democracy. However, Ravitch reminds us that the Disrupters are still threatening. She compares today’s danger to that which faced a man who decapitated a rattlesnake but who nearly died after being bitten by the detached head.

So, we can’t lower our guard until the principles that inspired the Resistance are safe in our schools.

According to the CREDO analysis of the impacts of charter management organizations, the Brooke charter schools in Boston showed the greatest positive impact on student academic growth of any CMO in the United States.

The CREDO research is based on results ending in 2014-2015.

If we look at what the state department of education tells about the attrition rates for the Brooke schools for that school year we find:
Brooke Mattapan
summer attrition: 4.2%
school year stability rate: 94.9%

Diane: “The charter studies that show ‘no difference’ are national, not limited to Boston”‘

I am sure that you can successfully cite literature showing that all charter schools nationwide have in fairly recent times been considered to get average academic results compared to district schools in their same communities. I continue to be skeptical that you can cite research showing a nationwide correlation between high attrition and high performance.

You had written: “It took nearly another decade for policy makers to accept the fact that charters get average results except for those with high attrition”

It seems from the context that you were aiming to suggest that high attrition is associated with the most positive results. While the opposite seems more likely true.

What we’ve seen here in Boston is indeed the opposite of what you suggest, we’ve seen those schools with high attrition getting worse than average academic results and that those with low attrition getting better than average. Not just the Brooke schools.

For example, last I checked, the first column below was the “overall performance” figure which our state department of education uses to rank each Boston charter school compared to schools serving similar grade levels in both affluent and low-income areas state-wide. The second column was the school’s corresponding summer attrition rate. For example, the first line would be a charter school, with admission by lottery, that is ranked by the state in the 97 percentile of schools serving the same grades, and that has a summer attrition rate of 5.3% (the typical TPS rate is slightly above 14%).

Credo- funded by the Waltons with a director who was initially defensive about identifying her funders (and reluctant) and, who is married to Hanushek? His c-v. should inform about the source of his grants. We know he was in Columbus along with Impatient Optimist (didn’t see that in the promos) John N. Friedman whose research is described in the book chapter, “…a Gaggle of Other Failed Reforms”.
The event in Columbus was sponsored by Gates.

BTW Steve.
Perfect symbolism- A British royal prince joins with Stanford and Goldman Sachs.
Next stop- promotion of social impact bonds and bashing of public schools. The folks at the Stanford Institute for the Evisceration of People’s Retirement can have a royal audience!

What’s important is results. Anyone interested in education as a road out of poverty for poor children, needs to study this shining example of a school that is achieving brilliant results, in the United Kingdom: Their methods need to be adopted in the US.

From the Wikipedia article about Michaela School.

In its first set of GCSE results in August 2019, half of the pupils who sat exams got Grade 7 or above in at least five subjects and almost a quarter got Grade 7 or better in all their subjects. Overall 18% of entries received grade 9, the highest grade, compared to 4.5% nationwide. In maths, one entry in four achieved grade 9. The school’s Progress 8 benchmark score placed it fifth nationally.

In September 2019, the school was cited by Education Secretary Gavin Williamson as “an example of a free school in a tough area that had achieved excellent results”.[ In November 2019, it was praised by Andreas Schleicher, coordinator of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

In December 2019, the school was selected by The Good Schools Guide as one of its “12 Schools of Christmas”, describing it as “Not for the faint hearted, the cynical or the fragile. Strict, but with a warm heart beating below the surface, Michaela creates a safe, but stimulating environment, and the chance to fly”.
[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaela_Community_School%5D

Googling on ‘Michaela School’ will bring further articles.

They did brilliantly. Everyone should want schools like Michaela to be available — free of charge to any child, supported by taxation.

This school’s amaing success did not really get the publicity in the UK you might imagine it would have. Conservative Members of Parliament all send their hcildren to private schools, and don’t really care about the education of working class children. And it’s been suggested that they positively don’t like the idea of ordinary children from the lower classes, competing with their own, privately-educated children, for places at the top universities. I would never say such a thing.

Everyone who genuinely cares about children should read about Micheala School.

The school’s 484 pupils study in an atmosphere of rigid austerity. ‘Demerits’ are given out for the slightest errors: forgetting a pen, slouching, turning to look out of a window during a lesson. Two demerits in one class equals a detention. “That’s another demerit… you’re too disorganized,” an English teacher tells one girl who’s struggled to find her textbook in the allocated ten seconds.

You like boot camp education for other people’s children.

We have our own versions of this detention camp ugliness branded as “Success Academy Schools.”

I agree totally. I do not think children should be forced to go to a boot camp-style school when they have done nothing to deserve it. I think doing this is the same as terrorists forcing children to learn how to become psycho killers. Those children risk being damaged for life.

The reason I agree with you is that after I graduated from high school, I voluntarily joined the U.S. Marine Corps and experienced the “living unending nightmare” of U.S. Marine Corps Bootcamp where the voluntary recruits were broken down and rebuilt as machines that would die or kill on command, or else. After serving in Vietnam, I came back damaged with a severe case of combat induced PTSD. And I have lived with the damage caused by PTSD since. No innocent child should be damaged like that against their will. No parent should force their child into a negative environment like that.

How many of those children will end up with PTSD? You do not have to be a combat veteran to end up with PTSD. Any kind of physical and/or mental abuse can do the same damage.

Do not get me wrong. If given another choice (sort of like a Ground Hog day repeat, after experiencing the real thing) at the age when I graduated from high school, I would join the Marines, again. But that was my decision. No one forced me to join the U.S. Marines. I did not commit any crimes that caused a judge to give me a choice to go to prison or join the Marines. Going to that brutal boot camp environment was my choice and it wasn’t like I didn’t know. I had been warned. But even with the warnings of how tough and brutal boot camp was, I wasn’t ready for the real thing.

I repeat, no child that is probably five or six starting out in a publicly funded, for-profit, private sector secretive, brutal, inhuman, bullying charter school environment like Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy’s boot camp-style schools force on children should ever be forced into that environment and if they were given a choice and said yes, they should be free to change their minds at any time, autocratic parents be damned.

Please source your quote. I would like to read everything negative about this school, because everything I have read so far … including from leftwing sources like The Guardian newspaper — makes me think this is the answer to our mediocre, failing schools.

Everything I have read about Michaela School — including from Leftwingers who have been there, prepared to be critical — says that the kids there LOVE it. And so they should! They’re now competing with and matching the children of rich white liberals who can afford to send their children to private schools, or who live in upper middle class areas where the public schools are not so bad.

Doug1943, who hacked your brain and planted the rancid seeds that sprouted the poison that claimed: “makes me think this is the answer to our mediocre, failing schools.”

America’s public schools have never been mediocre, failing schools, at least up until 2002 and GW Bush’s misleading ‘No Child Left Behind Act’ that did more damage to our previously steadily improving public schools than the flawed and misleading report, A Nation at Risk, from Reagan’s era of political corruption and misinformation that paralleled the rise of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his message of hate and endless lies.

“A Nation at Risk” cited statistics such as: “The average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched,” and “[The SAT demonstrates] a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points.”

Those numbers weren’t made up. But they weren’t the only ones out there.

The report de-emphasized the fact that more students than ever were graduating from high school and attending college, and that top U.S. students led the world in academic achievement.

The Department of Energy — yes, Energy — commissioned a follow-up analysis of test score trends in 1990. It was known as the Sandia Report, after the federally funded Sandia National Laboratories which produced it.

Its authors were engineers trying to generate economic forecasts, not education authorities with an ax to grind. And they didn’t diagnose the same disaster that “A Nation At Risk” did.

“To our surprise, on nearly every measure, we found steady or slightly improving trends,” one of the authors, Robert Huelskamp, later wrote.

As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations: U.S. rankings would rise to sixth from 14th in reading and to 13th from 25th in math. The gap between U.S. students and those from the highest-achieving countries would be cut in half in reading and by at least a third in math.

“You can’t compare nations’ test scores without looking at the social class characteristics of students who take the test in different countries,” said Carnoy. “Nations with more lower social class students will have lower overall scores, because these students don’t perform as well academically, even in good schools. Policymakers should understand how our lower and higher social class students perform in comparison to similar students in other countries before recommending sweeping school reforms.”

The report also found:

There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.

It’s actually highly racist to support regimented military style schools for children from poor (largely minority) families but not for children of the middle class and wealthy.

Why do the children from poor families NOT deserve the same type of schools as middle class and wealthy children?

Please explain.

And quoting Andreas Schleicher is supposed to make the claims about the school credible? The fellow is not a legitimate statistician, but a “statustician” ,(one who pretends to do statistics in order to gain attention, credibility, fame and/or wealth)

an d here is my comment
In this post truth society, isn’t it time that you knew why the schools failed, and what can be done!
I love the way Diane shows us the fallacy in the spin — the endless rhetoric — from the charlatans about “tests, competition, and accountability.” Dr. Ravitch, took askance with Arne Duncan’s public relations officer (Walton-funded reformer Peter Cunningham) when he uttered as if it were true: “We measure what we treasure.”
Ravitch’s response was, “I was taken aback because I could not imagine how to measure what I treasure: my family, my friends, my pets, my colleagues, my work, the art and books I have collected.”
And that foreshadows the victory of the Resistance over Goliath.
You see, authentic educators, patrons, and students agree that children are more than a test score.

I faced thousands of young children for a lifetime as a career practitioner of pedagogy aka ‘teaching kids.’ I knew who sat in front of me, long before a test measured some skill. Their ‘performance’ as speakers, as thinkers, and readers and a writers told me more than any test of spelling or grammar.
Critical thinking skills can only be assessed through performance; as Harvard proved in their standards research The Principles of Learning. I know, because ‘they’ sent Pew into my professional practice to observe how I motivated my kids to think, to learn the process, to do hard work, and finally to write well.

Of course, Gates had to replace teachers like me, who were autonomous in their own practice, and would never use the Core Curricula crap that became a mandate thanks to Duncan.

My story is THE story, for another time, but I can assure you that former ass’t Asst’ Secretary of Education, and historian Diane Ravitch knows it well; we met decades ago, as the assault on public education began. My series here at OPED news is often taken from Diane’s astonishing blog.

But, if you want the BIG picture, put together as only this superb story-teller and historian can tell it, then get “Slaying Goliath.”In this post truth society, isn’t it time that you knew why the schools failed, and what can be done!

Ravitch’s new suspense book, Slaying Goliath, focuses deserved attention on miracle workers in the policy battle against barbarians inside the gates of public education.
The nation’s preeminent education expert has written a critically important book that is without equal and tells a story never told before. The author’s heart and head are evident in her assemblage of the moving parts of a complex exposé into a compelling, essential and easy to read account.

K-12 scholars eagerly anticipated Ravitch’s book and all Americans should feel the same- those with careers in business, community action, government, religion or, in the academy
in disciplines outside of education, those whose children attend public schools and who understand that their communities are socially tethered to local schools, those who pay taxes locally for schools and, those who haven’t until now been forced to consider the importance of non-discriminatory, tax-supported schools that have democratically elected boards.
Slaying Goliath is the book for this time and this century. Muckrakers of the past investigated in a different environment- grievances were narrow in scope, villains were limited in number and easily-identified. Dr. Ravitch’s book names a dizzying array of interconnected cutthroats and racketeers who are known to the public as respectable and, layer upon layer of schemes. After starting Slaying Goliath, I couldn’t put it down and read it well into the night—–rereading the 100 pages I earmarked for further perusal is another story.

My favorite line in the book, is near the beginning, “They asserted they were leading the civil rights movement of our times against the powerful (themselves!)